In this
extract taken from the
Introduction to This Changes
Everything by Naomi Klein,
the author calls the climate
crisis a civilisational
wake-up call to alter our
economy, our lifestyles, now
– before they get changed
for us. You can
read the first extract here.
March 08, 2015 "ICH"
- "The
Guardian" - The
alarm bells of the climate crisis have been
ringing in our ears for years and are
getting louder all the time - yet humanity
has failed to change course. What is wrong
with us?
Many answers to that
question have been offered, ranging from the
extreme difficulty of getting all the
governments in the world to agree on
anything, to an absence of real
technological solutions, to something deep
in our human nature that keeps us from
acting in the face of seemingly remote
threats, to – more recently – the claim that
we have blown it anyway and there is no
point in even trying to do much more than
enjoy the scenery on the way down.
Some of these explanations
are valid, but all are ultimately
inadequate. Take the claim that it’s just
too hard for so many countries to agree on a
course of action. It is hard. But many times
in the past, the United Nations has helped
governments to come together to tackle tough
cross-border challenges, from ozone
depletion to nuclear proliferation. The
deals produced weren’t perfect, but they
represented real progress. Moreover, during
the same years that our governments failed
to enact a tough and binding legal
architecture requiring emission reductions,
supposedly because cooperation was too
complex, they managed to create the World
Trade Organisation – an intricate global
system that regulates the flow of goods and
services around the planet, under which the
rules are clear and violations are harshly
penalised.
The assertion that we have
been held back by a lack of technological
solutions is no more compelling. Power from
renewable sources like wind and water
predates the use of fossil fuels and is
becoming cheaper, more efficient, and
easier to store every year. The past two
decades have seen an explosion of ingenious
zero-waste design, as well as green urban
planning. Not only do we have the technical
tools to get off fossil fuels, we also have
no end of small pockets where these low
carbon lifestyles have been tested with
tremendous success. And yet the kind of
large-scale transition that would give us a
collective chance of averting catastrophe
eludes us.
Is it just human nature
that holds us back then? In fact we humans
have shown ourselves willing to collectively
sacrifice in the face of threats many times,
most famously in the embrace of rationing,
victory gardens, and victory bonds during
world wars one and two. Indeed to support
fuel conservation during world war two,
pleasure driving was virtually eliminated in
the UK, and between 1938 and 1944, use of
public transit went up by 87% in the US and
by 95% in Canada. Twenty million US
households – representing three fifths of
the population – were growing victory
gardens in 1943, and their yields accounted
for 42% of the fresh vegetables consumed
that year. Interestingly, all of these
activities together dramatically reduce
carbon emissions.
Yes, the threat of war
seemed immediate and concrete but so too is
the threat posed by the climate crisis that
has already likely been a substantial
contributor to massive disasters in some of
the world’s major cities. Still, we’ve gone
soft since those days of wartime sacrifice,
haven’t we? Contemporary humans are too
self-centered, too addicted to gratification
to live without the full freedom to satisfy
our every whim – or so our culture tells us
every day. And yet the truth is that we
continue to make collective sacrifices in
the name of an abstract greater good all the
time. We sacrifice our pensions, our
hard-won labour rights, our arts and
after-school programmes. We accept that we
have to pay dramatically more for the
destructive energy sources that power our
transportation and our lives. We accept that
bus and subway fares go up and up while
service fails to improve or degenerates. We
accept that a public university education
should result in a debt that will take half
a lifetime to pay off when such a thing was
unheard of a generation ago.
The past 30 years have
been a steady process of getting less and
less in the public sphere. This is all
defended in the name of austerity, the
current justification for these never-ending
demands for collective sacrifice. In the
past, calls for balanced budgets, greater
efficiency, and faster economic growth have
served the same role.
It seems to me that if
humans are capable of sacrificing this much
collective benefit in the name of
stabilising an economic system that makes
daily life so much more expensive and
precarious, then surely humans should be
capable of making some important lifestyle
changes in the interest of stabilising the
physical systems upon which all of life
depends. Especially because many of the
changes that need to be made to dramatically
cut emissions would also materially improve
the quality of life for the majority of
people on the planet – from allowing kids in
Beijing to play outside without wearing
pollution masks to creating good jobs in
clean energy sectors for millions.
Time is tight, to be sure.
But we could commit ourselves, tomorrow, to
radically cutting our fossil fuel emissions
and beginning the shift to zero-carbon
sources of energy based on renewable
technology, with a full-blown transition
underway within the decade. We have the
tools to do that. And if we did, the seas
would still rise and the storms would still
come, but we would stand a much greater
chance of preventing truly catastrophic
warming. Indeed, entire nations could be
saved from the waves.
So my mind keeps coming
back to the question: what is wrong with us?
I think the answer is far more simple than
many have led us to believe: we have not
done the things that are necessary to lower
emissions because those things fundamentally
conflict with deregulated capitalism, the
reigning ideology for the entire period we
have been struggling to find a way out of
this crisis. We are stuck because the
actions that would give us the best chance
of averting catastrophe – and would benefit
the vast majority – are extremely
threatening to an elite minority that has a
stranglehold over our economy, our political
process, and most of our major media
outlets. That problem might not have been
insurmountable had it presented itself at
another point in our history. But it is our
great collective misfortune that the
scientific community made its decisive
diagnosis of the climate threat at the
precise moment when those elites were
enjoying more unfettered political,
cultural, and intellectual power than at any
point since the 1920s. Indeed, governments
and scientists began
talking seriously about radical cuts to
greenhouse gas emissions in 1988 – the
exact year that marked the dawning of what
came to be called “globalisation,” with the
signing of the agreement representing the
world’s largest bilateral trade relationship
between Canada and the US, later to be
expanded into the North American Free Trade
Agreement (Nafta) with the inclusion of
Mexico.
The three policy pillars
of this new era are familiar to us all:
privatisation of the public sphere,
deregulation of the corporate sector, and
lower corporate taxation, paid for with cuts
to public spending. Much has been written
about the real-world costs of these policies
– the instability of financial markets, the
excesses of the super-rich, and the
desperation of the increasingly disposable
poor, as well as the failing state of public
infrastructure and services. Very little,
however, has been written about how market
fundamentalism has, from the very first
moments, systematically sabotaged our
collective response to climate change.
The core problem was that
the stranglehold that market logic secured
over public life in this period made the
most direct and obvious climate responses
seem politically heretical. How, for
instance, could societies invest massively
in zero-carbon public services and
infrastructure at a time when the public
sphere was being systematically dismantled
and auctioned off? How could governments
heavily regulate, tax, and penalise fossil
fuel companies when all such measures were
being dismissed as relics of “command and
control” communism? And how could the
renewable energy sector receive the supports
and protections it needed to replace fossil
fuels when “protectionism” had been made a
dirty word?
Even more directly, the
policies that so successfully freed
multinational corporations from virtually
all constraints also contributed
significantly to the underlying cause of
global warming – rising greenhouse gas
emissions. The numbers are striking: In the
1990s, as the market integration project
ramped up, global emissions were going up an
average of one percent a year; by the 2000s,
with “emerging markets” like China now fully
integrated into the world economy, emissions
growth had sped up disastrously, with the
annual rate of increase reaching 3.4% a year
for much of the decade. That
rapid growth rate continues to this day,
interrupted only briefly in 2009 by the
world financial crisis. Emissions rebounded
with a vengeance in 2010, which
saw the largest absolute increase since the
Industrial Revolution.
With hindsight, it’s hard
to see how it could have turned out
otherwise. The twin signatures of this era
have been the mass export of products across
vast distances (relentlessly burning carbon
all the way), and the import of a uniquely
wasteful model of production, consumption,
and agriculture to every corner of the world
(also based on the profligate burning of
fossil fuels). Put differently, the
liberation of world markets, a process
powered by the liberation of unprecedented
amounts of fossil fuels from the earth, has
dramatically sped up the same process that
is liberating Arctic ice from existence.
As a result, we now find
ourselves in a very difficult and slightly
ironic position. Because of those decades of
hardcore emitting, exactly when we were
supposed to be cutting back, the things we
must do to avoid catastrophic warming are no
longer just in conflict with the particular
strain of deregulated capitalism that
triumphed in the 1980s. They are now in
conflict with the fundamental imperative at
the heart of our economic model: grow or
die.
Once carbon has been
emitted into the atmosphere, it sticks
around for hundreds of years, some of it
even longer, trapping heat. The
effects are cumulative, growing more severe
with time. And according to emissions
specialists like the Tyndall Centre’s Kevin
Anderson (as well as others), so much carbon
has been allowed to accumulate in the
atmosphere over the past two decades that
now our only hope of keeping warming below
the internationally agreed-upon target of 2C
is for wealthy countries to
cut their emissions by somewhere in the
neighbourhood of eight to 10% a year.
The“free” market simply
cannot accomplish this task. Indeed, this
level of emission reduction has happened
only in the context of economic collapse or
deep depressions.
What those numbers mean is
that our economic system and our planetary
system are now at war. Or, more accurately,
our economy is at war with many forms of
life on earth, including human life. What
the climate needs to avoid collapse is a
contraction in humanity’s use of resources;
what our economic model demands to avoid
collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one
of these sets of rules can be changed, and
it’s not the laws of nature.
Fortunately, it is
eminently possible to transform our economy
so that it is less resource-intensive, and
to do it in ways that are equitable, with
the most vulnerable protected and the most
responsible bearing the bulk of the burden.
Low-carbon sectors of our economies can be
encouraged to expand and create jobs, while
high-carbon sectors are encouraged to
contract. The problem, however, is that this
scale of economic planning and management is
entirely outside the boundaries of our
reigning ideology. The only kind of
contraction our current system can manage is
a brutal crash, in which the most vulnerable
will suffer most of all.
So we are left with a
stark choice: allow climate disruption to
change everything about our world, or change
pretty much everything about our economy to
avoid that fate. But we need to be very
clear: because of our decades of collective
denial, no gradual, incremental options are
now available to us. Gentle tweaks to the
status quo stopped being a climate option
when we supersized the American Dream in the
1990s, and then proceeded to take it global.
And it’s no longer just radicals who see the
need for radical change. In 2012, 21 past
winners of the prestigious Blue Planet Prize
– a group that includes James Hansen, former
director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for
Space Studies, and Gro Harlem Brundtland,
former prime minister of Norway –
authored a landmark report. It stated
that, “in the face of an absolutely
unprecedented emergency, society has no
choice but to take dramatic action to avert
a collapse of civilization. Either we will
change our ways and build an entirely new
kind of global society, or they will be
changed for us.”
That’s tough for a lot of
people in important positions to accept,
since it challenges something that might be
even more powerful than capitalism, and that
is the fetish of centrism – of
reasonableness, seriousness, splitting the
difference, and generally not getting overly
excited about anything. This is the habit of
thought that truly rules our era, far more
among the liberals who concern themselves
with matters of climate policy than among
conservatives, many of whom simply deny the
existence of the crisis.
Climate change presents a profound
challenge to this cautious centrism because
half measures won’t cut it: “all of the
above energy” program, as US president
Barack Obama describes his approach, has
about as much chance of success as an
all-of-the-above diet, and the firm
deadlines imposed by science require that we
get very worked up indeed.
The challenge, then, is
not simply that we need to spend a lot of
money and change a lot of policies; it’s
that we need to think differently, radically
differently, for those changes to be
remotely possible. A worldview will need to
rise to the fore that sees nature, other
nations, and our own neighbours not as
adversaries, but rather as partners in a
grand project of mutual reinvention.
That’s a big ask. But it
gets bigger. Because of our endless
procrastination, we also
have to pull off this massive transformation
without delay. The International Energy
Agency (IEA) warns that if we do not get our
emissions under control by a rather
terrifying 2017, our fossil fuel economy
will “lock-in” extremely dangerous warming.
“The energy-related infrastructure then in
place will generate all the CO2 emissions
allowed” in our carbon budget for limiting
warming to 2C – “leaving no room for
additional power plants, factories and other
infrastructure unless they are zero-carbon,
which would be extremely costly”. This
assumes, probably accurately, that
governments would be unwilling to force the
closure of still profitable power plants and
factories.
As Fatih Birol, the IEA’s chief economist,
bluntly put it: “The door to reach two
degrees is about to close. In 2017 it will
be closed forever.” In short, we have
reached what some activists have started
calling “Decade Zero” of the climate crisis:
we either change now or we lose our chance.
All this means that the usual free market
assurances – A techno-fix is around the
corner! Dirty development is just a phase on
the way to a clean environment, look at
19th-century London! – simply don’t add up.
We don’t have a century to spare for China
and India to move past their Dickensian
phases. Because of our lost decades, it is
time to turn this around now. Is it
possible? Absolutely. Is it possible without
challenging the fundamental logic of
deregulated capitalism? Not a chance.
I was struck recently by a
mea culpa of sorts, written by Gary Stix, a
senior editor of Scientific American. Back
in 2006, he edited a special issue on
responses to climate change and, like most
such efforts, the articles were narrowly
focused on showcasing exciting low-carbon
technologies.
But
in 2012 Stix wrote that he had
overlooked a much larger and more important
part of the story – the need to create the
social and political context in which these
technological shifts stand a chance of
displacing the all too profitable status
quo. “If we are ever to cope with climate
change in any fundamental way, radical
solutions on the social side are where we
must focus, though. The relative efficiency
of the next generation of solar cells is
trivial by comparison.”
In other words,our problem has a lot less to do
with the mechanics of solar power than the
politics of human power – specifically
whether there can be a shift in who wields
it, a shift away from corporations and
toward communities, which in turn depends on
whether or not the great many people who are
getting a rotten deal under our current
system can build a determined and diverse
enough social force to change the balance of
power. Such a shift would require rethinking
the very nature of humanity’s power – our
right to extract ever more without facing
consequences, our capacity to bend complex
natural systems to our will. This is a shift
that challenges not only capitalism, but
also the building blocks of materialism that
preceded modern capitalism, a mentality some
call “extractivism”.
Because, underneath all of
this is the real truth we have been
avoiding: climate change isn’t an “issue” to
add to the list of things to worry about,
next to healthcare and taxes. It is a
civilisational wake-up call. A powerful
message – spoken in the language of fires,
floods, droughts, and extinctions – telling
us that we need an entirely new economic
model and a new way of sharing this planet.
Telling us that we need to evolve.
Some say there is no time
for this transformation; the crisis is too
pressing and the clock is ticking. I agree
that it would be reckless to claim that the
only solution to this crisis is to
revolutionise our economy and revamp our
worldview from the bottom up – and anything
short of that is not worth doing. There are
all kinds of measures that would lower
emissions substantively that could and
should be done right now. But we aren’t
taking those measures, are we? The reason is
that by failing to fight these big battles
that stand to shift our ideological
direction and change the balance of who
holds power in our societies, a context has
been slowly created in which any muscular
response to climate change seems politically
impossible, especially during times of
economic crisis.
On the other hand,if we can shift the cultural
context even a little, then there will be
some breathing room for those sensible
reformist policies that will at least get
the atmospheric carbon numbers moving in the
right direction. And winning is contagious
so, who knows?
For a quarter of a
century, we have tried the approach of
polite incremental change, attempting to
bend the physical needs of the planet to our
economic model’s need for constant growth
and new profit-making opportunities. The
results have been disastrous, leaving us all
in a great deal more danger than when the
experiment began.
Looking for a Moose
is one of my two-year-old son’s favourite
books. It’s about a bunch of kids that
really, really, really want to see a moose.
They search high and low – through a forest,
a swamp, in brambly bushes and up a
mountain, for “a long legged, bulgy nosed,
branchy antlered moose”.
The joke is that there are
moose hiding on each page. In the end, the
animals all come out of hiding and the
ecstatic kids proclaim: “We’ve never ever
seen so many moose!”
On about the 75th reading,
it suddenly hit me: he might never see a
moose. I tried to hold it together. I went
back to my computer and began to write about
my time in northern Alberta, tar sands
country, where members of the Beaver Lake
Cree Nation told me about how the moose had
changed – one woman described killing a
moose on a hunting trip only to find that
the flesh had already turned green. I heard
a lot about strange tumors too, which locals
assumed had to do with the animals drinking
water contaminated by tar sands toxins. But
mostly I heard about how the moose were
simply gone.
And not just in Alberta.
“Rapid Climate Changes Turn North Woods into
Moose Graveyard,” reads a
May 2012 headline in Scientific American.
A year and a half later,
The New York Timeswas reporting
that one of Minnesota’s two moose
populations had declined from four thousand
in the 1990s to just one hundred today. Will
he ever see a moose?
Then, the other day, I was
slain by a miniature board book called
Snuggle Wuggle. It involves
different animals cuddling, with each
posture given a ridiculously silly name:
“How does a bat hug?” it asks. “Topsy turvy,
topsy turvy.” For some reason my son
reliably cracks up at this page. I explain
that it means upside down, because that’s
the way bats sleep.
But all I could think
about was the
report of some 100,000 dead and dying bats
raining down from the sky in the midst of
record-breaking heat across part of
Queensland, Australia. Whole colonies
devastated. Will he ever see a bat?
When fear like that used
to creep through my armour of climate change
denial, I would do my utmost to stuff it
away, change the channel, click past it. Now
I try to feel it. It seems to me that I owe
it to my son, just as we all owe it to
ourselves and one another.
But what should we do with
this fear that comes from living on a planet
that is dying, made less alive every day?
First, accept that it won’t go away. That it
is a fully rational response to the
unbearable reality that we are living in a
dying world, a world that a great many of us
are helping to kill, by doing things like
making tea and driving to the grocery store
and yes, okay, having kids.
Next, use it. Fear is a
survival response. Fear makes us run, it
makes us leap, it can make us act
superhuman. But we need somewhere to run
to. Without that, the fear is only
paralysing. So the real trick, the only
hope, really, is to allow the terror of an
unlivable future to be balanced and soothed
by the prospect of building something much
better than many of us have previously dared
hope.
Yes, there will be things
we will lose, luxuries some of us will have
to give up, whole industries that will
disappear. Climate change is already here,
and increasingly brutal disasters are headed
our way no matter what we do. But it’s not
too late to avert the worst, and there is
still time to change ourselves so that we
are far less brutal to one another when
those disasters strike. And that, it seems
to me, is worth a great deal.
Because the thing about a
crisis this big, this all-encompassing, is
that it changes everything. It changes what
we can do, what we can hope for, what we can
demand from ourselves and our leaders. It
means there is a whole lot of stuff that we
have been told is inevitable that simply
cannot stand. And it means that a whole lot
of stuff we have been told is impossible has
to start happening right away.
Can we pull it off? All I
know is that nothing is inevitable. Nothing
except that climate change changes
everything. And for a very brief time, the
nature of that change is still up to us.
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